The SitePoint PHP blog continues their series looking at the use of the Solarium tool to work with the SOLR searching tool in PHP. In this latest part (part two) of the series they move beyond the setup and configuration and get into some actual code to use the server.

This is the second article in a four part series on using Solarium, in conjunction with Apache’s SOLR search implementation. In the first part, I introduced the key concepts and we installed and set up SOLR. In this second part we’ll install Solarium, start building an example application, populate the search index and get into a position where we can start running searches.

The frontend, based on the Laravel framework, is simple to get up and running with just a few lines of code. They walk you through the basic CRUD kinds of steps, "pinging" the server to ensure it's up and searching the documents you've added.

Juan Treminio has written up a post about a new tool he's created that makes generating Vagrant/Puppet configs easy - PuPHPet.

I just released the initial version of PuPHPet, my GUI-based gnerator for Vagrant/Puppet environments! [...] Enter PuPHPet, my GUI configurator. I have created a simple, easy to use web app that targets PHP developers and the classic LAMP stack. You will not need to learn the ins and outs of Vagrant or Puppet to build your own working VM to your specific needs. As of now you can define things like custom virtual hosts, what version of PHP to install, set up some MySQL databases, etc, all without having to touch a manifest file.

His tool (hosted version is here) lets you define things like machine name, IP address, memory and target folder. You can pick from various server, PHP, MySQL and Apache packages you want installed as well. A custom archive (zip) file will be created that can be dropped into your system ready for use.

Paul Reinheimer has posted about some updates to a profiler project he's been working on, XHProf, with some new GUI improvements thanks to Highcharts. XHProf is a function-level hierarchical profiler for PHP and has a simple HTML based user interface.

I merged my Highcharts branch into master today, including a bunch of improvements to the GUI for XHProf including: using Highcharts for graphing URLs over time, which allows for multiple axis per graph, adding a pie chart to the individual run page to show where time was spent on page load, ability to merge various calls for display within the pie chart (e.g. mysql_* into mysql), switched to the javascript tablesorter for the single run results, filter to allow you to view results only from a specific server or domain

You can see two screenshots of this new feature in action here and here. If you'd like to give the tool a try, you can grab the latest version from github.

Facebook was kind enough to open source the XHProf extension last year, but it flew under my radar until I saw a presentation including it earlier this year when they showed off HipHop. XHProf provides profiling information about your application, while being lightweight enough to run on a production server (against a percentage of requests). Once we got it installed we ran into a few limitations with the existing GUI.

His deadlines were tight, so he admits the code isn't as robust as it could be, but he does offer a tool that uses MySQL for data storage, keeps stats on things like peak memory usage and wall time and uses the Google Data Visualization API to run graphs of the data over time. You can see a few screenshots of the tool in action in the post including this sample graph and this comparison of two different runs against the same resources.

NETTUTS.com has posted their list of the top fifteen "wonderfully creative" uses for PHP on your sites.

If you are familiar with the basics of PHP, then you're probably wondering how you can use it to make your website more appealing. The possibilities are endless, and you can write your own PHP scripts or implement widely available scripts from around the web. Let's get started with 15 creative uses for PHP for your website!

Some of the uses mentioned include:

E-Commerce

Graphical User Interface

Building an Online Community

Parsing XML Files

Image Processing and Generation

Create a PHP Photo Gallery

Others include templating, working with Flash and with one of the more popular PHP blogging tools - WordPress.

On the Developer Tutorials website, Michael Ross has written up a guide to step you through the installation of PHP on a Windows machine (on basically any flavor of Windows too).

Your PC can be turned into a fully capable Web development environment, by installing those three technologies, and configuring them so they communicate with one another. Admittedly, you can simply install and use PHP for its command-line processing. But for creating and testing dynamically generated Web pages on your local machine, then Apache needs to be already installed and working.

If you're wanting to set that part up before you get started and aren't sure how, check out the other tutorial to get started. He works through the process with you, including screenshots of the installer and how to toss MySQL in to the mix.

Our client is looking for a consultant to start asap for a 3-6 month contract opening starting asap for a GUI developer:

Description:

Senior Software Engineer with 5+ years of experience in web application development, specifically on the client GUI side. A good candidate would have strong technical and communication skills with the ability to work independently and in a team environment. Must be able to translate requirements into detailed design specifications and drive the development to completion – including implementation, unit testing, integration, testing, and so on.

Responsibilities:

You will be responsible for the client side of theclient's monitoring and management software. This entails new designs and making enhancements to existing software.

Technical Requirements:

Must be strong in UI (look-and-feel) design

3+ years using PHP, HTML, CSS, Java Script

Web Services

Strong SQL with Oracle

Desirable are MySQL, Perl, UNIX scripting, Java Having System administration experience is a plus.

Our client is looking for a consultant to start asap for a 3-6 month contract opening starting asap for a GUI developer:

Description:

Senior Software Engineer with 5+ years of experience in web application development, specifically on the client GUI side. A good candidate would have strong technical and communication skills with the ability to work independently and in a team environment. Must be able to translate requirements into detailed design specifications and drive the development to completion – including implementation, unit testing, integration, testing, and so on.

Responsibilities:

You will be responsible for the client side of theclient's monitoring and management software. This entails new designs and making enhancements to existing software.

Technical Requirements:

Must be strong in UI (look-and-feel) design

3+ years using PHP, HTML, CSS, Java Script

Web Services

Strong SQL with Oracle

Desirable are MySQL, Perl, UNIX scripting, Java Having System administration experience is a plus.

Lee Underwood shares a handy bit of software in this quick article on Developer.com - a GUI program that helps you execute your PHP scripts on Windows without the setup time of something like XAMPP.

There's no need to install a server and PHP and then try to coordinate them in order to get them to work together. Script GUI comes in one compact package. It includes a server, which is only available to the built-in browser and is a nice security feature. In addition, it supports CGI, virtual hosts, directory aliases, custom error documents and understands most commands in .htaccess files.

He tell how it works (pretty much just install and go) and how it can be configured to work with virtual hosts. Best of all, it already comes with the latest version of PHP for Windows and can interface with several of the popular databases out there.

Lee Underwood shares a handy bit of software in this quick article on Developer.com - a GUI program that helps you execute your PHP scripts on Windows without the setup time of something like XAMPP.

There's no need to install a server and PHP and then try to coordinate them in order to get them to work together. Script GUI comes in one compact package. It includes a server, which is only available to the built-in browser and is a nice security feature. In addition, it supports CGI, virtual hosts, directory aliases, custom error documents and understands most commands in .htaccess files.

He tell how it works (pretty much just install and go) and how it can be configured to work with virtual hosts. Best of all, it already comes with the latest version of PHP for Windows and can interface with several of the popular databases out there.